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Abstract

imagine having a daughter birthed, grow up under my tutelage and my dreams and hopes for her, just to lose her to a dangerous man in her marriage a couple of decades or so later. What would have been the whole point to have invested my emotional stock in my child and to see her off, wishing her more than I had, only to witness her death at a young age and in the most unfortunate sexist of circumstances?</p><p id="8543">And what of the in-law mother — how must she have felt? Was she a weak mother in giving in to the social pressures and letting her daughter-in-law suffer as she did?</p><h2 id="176d">My Blessed Mother</h2><p id="e28b">Even though, funnily enough, I am psychologically just as concerned to admit to my parents any marital failure of any kind, my mother has been the kind to oftentimes explicitly say to me how she’d take care for me in any form if I needed it; I can always come home, call on her, be her kid again, anytime.</p><p id="50d7">I am floored by these sentiments. Perhaps because I have no daughters of my own to fully appreciate that. But her words touch me over and over again as I compare it to the stories I’ve read about how other daughters, in certainly other less fortunate countries, might not have it as open or loving between themselves and their parents due to all sorts of reasons including their cultural and national norms.</p><h2 id="4fdc">My Annual Reminders</h2><p id="03c9">This year, Mother’s Day, isn’t particularly painful but it does remind me of the annual reality of being childless — how I am not the recipient of any Mother’s Day wishes.</p><p id="8883">I sometimes justify that by internally remarking how much trouble my own mother has gone to, to birth me, and still ‘mother’ me all these years later regardless of my circumstances and my age which I imagine if I were in her shoes, it could be more than I could endure given my difference in philosophy or tolerance, perhaps. Would I be a weaker mother?</p><p id="c0f8">So over the years I’m grown numb to the feelings of a regretful lost opportunity in having children.</p><p id="ed79">As time passes, the thought of bringing a child into this world gets incr

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easingly difficult if not impossible. This was such a much easier thought decades ago — an automatic no-brainer and an assumed joyful event to look forward to (even before marriage). But the reality of life, from disagreements with the spouse on the subject of having children and other countless marital disputes along the way (things are always in progress) to then the unhealthy sociopolitical and cultural climate around the world (including sexist oppression, terrorist or extreme organizations that are against women’s rights, sex trafficking, pedophilia, extreme feminism, narcissistic celebritism, etc.), make this decision too difficult in more current day to be as gung ho about it as I was before in youthful innocence. Ignorance was indeed bliss before in this regard. Now, I’m hesitant for various practical reasons, notwithstanding the original hesitancy and drawbacks highlighted by my own spouse that has elongated the very decision I personally hadn’t considered in hesitating on, but then there is the current seemingly degrading and unenlightening times and my ever maturing age.</p><p id="98df">My mother is a rare breed, sincerely, and I don’t know if in these times, I could be as strong in all respects and be as similarly valuably rare as her. But in the meanwhile, it’s an annual holiday that is no less appropriately deserving of solid mothers like mine.</p><h2 id="830d">Thank you for supporting me by reading :)</h2><p id="59cb">Consider becoming a member through me (<a href="https://elanwriter.medium.com/membership"><b>Referral link</b></a>). Your gracious decision supports me with a portion of your fees but at no additional cost to you, and you still get full access to everyone else’s stories.</p><p id="de7d">Here are other supportive options: Gift me an annual membership <b>(<a href="http://medium.com/gift">Gift link</a>), </b>and/or buy paraphernalia from my<a href="http://lan-6.creator-spring.com"> <b>Élan shop</b></a>;</p><p id="726b">Please <a href="https://elanwriter.medium.com/subscribe"><b>subscribe</b></a>, I welcome you to my journey!</p><p id="5a59">Copyright © 2021 Élan-Writer. All rights reserved.</p></article></body>

A Mother’s Day 2021 Blessing

Motherhood Is Underrated

So, would I ever be as strong?

I can’t remember where I had read it, but it was a long while back in some news article about a woman in India who was married off in an arranged marriage and subsequently abused by her husband.

It was awful sexual abuse — the reason I remembered the content but not which newspaper it was in — as she hid in her in-law’s closet bleeding from her husband having stuck a curling iron into her vagina. Though she appealed to her in-laws who apparently didn’t help her, she also felt ashamed to go home to her parents for any reason; I assumed it was due to social and cultural pressures of arranged marriages in certain parts of India that are known to be traditionally against any marriage rift or divorce.

What I remember distinctly from the story was that ultimately, the girl’s parents were upset that their daughter had suffered to her eventual death because they would have welcomed her home if she had wanted to return yet somehow this was never outright expressed to her.

Of course, there is no telling what more to this story there was, but what struck me was the previously personally unrealized dangers of the universally-regarded rite of passage for a young woman to leave her parents’ home; and for many cultures that reason is to get married. But to then find herself in a trapped or inescapable relationship that is life-threatening, and on top of that, personally feeling ashamed or not wanting to appear as a failure in both society’s eyes and in her family’s in merely going back home or running away back to her parents, is devastating.

This makes motherhood seem so difficult. I couldn’t imagine having a daughter birthed, grow up under my tutelage and my dreams and hopes for her, just to lose her to a dangerous man in her marriage a couple of decades or so later. What would have been the whole point to have invested my emotional stock in my child and to see her off, wishing her more than I had, only to witness her death at a young age and in the most unfortunate sexist of circumstances?

And what of the in-law mother — how must she have felt? Was she a weak mother in giving in to the social pressures and letting her daughter-in-law suffer as she did?

My Blessed Mother

Even though, funnily enough, I am psychologically just as concerned to admit to my parents any marital failure of any kind, my mother has been the kind to oftentimes explicitly say to me how she’d take care for me in any form if I needed it; I can always come home, call on her, be her kid again, anytime.

I am floored by these sentiments. Perhaps because I have no daughters of my own to fully appreciate that. But her words touch me over and over again as I compare it to the stories I’ve read about how other daughters, in certainly other less fortunate countries, might not have it as open or loving between themselves and their parents due to all sorts of reasons including their cultural and national norms.

My Annual Reminders

This year, Mother’s Day, isn’t particularly painful but it does remind me of the annual reality of being childless — how I am not the recipient of any Mother’s Day wishes.

I sometimes justify that by internally remarking how much trouble my own mother has gone to, to birth me, and still ‘mother’ me all these years later regardless of my circumstances and my age which I imagine if I were in her shoes, it could be more than I could endure given my difference in philosophy or tolerance, perhaps. Would I be a weaker mother?

So over the years I’m grown numb to the feelings of a regretful lost opportunity in having children.

As time passes, the thought of bringing a child into this world gets increasingly difficult if not impossible. This was such a much easier thought decades ago — an automatic no-brainer and an assumed joyful event to look forward to (even before marriage). But the reality of life, from disagreements with the spouse on the subject of having children and other countless marital disputes along the way (things are always in progress) to then the unhealthy sociopolitical and cultural climate around the world (including sexist oppression, terrorist or extreme organizations that are against women’s rights, sex trafficking, pedophilia, extreme feminism, narcissistic celebritism, etc.), make this decision too difficult in more current day to be as gung ho about it as I was before in youthful innocence. Ignorance was indeed bliss before in this regard. Now, I’m hesitant for various practical reasons, notwithstanding the original hesitancy and drawbacks highlighted by my own spouse that has elongated the very decision I personally hadn’t considered in hesitating on, but then there is the current seemingly degrading and unenlightening times and my ever maturing age.

My mother is a rare breed, sincerely, and I don’t know if in these times, I could be as strong in all respects and be as similarly valuably rare as her. But in the meanwhile, it’s an annual holiday that is no less appropriately deserving of solid mothers like mine.

Thank you for supporting me by reading :)

Consider becoming a member through me (Referral link). Your gracious decision supports me with a portion of your fees but at no additional cost to you, and you still get full access to everyone else’s stories.

Here are other supportive options: Gift me an annual membership (Gift link), and/or buy paraphernalia from my Élan shop;

Please subscribe, I welcome you to my journey!